That's a valid excuse, the majority of players will refuse to change names, rightfully so.
I'd rather let a realm die than forcing players to change their precious names.

Amazingly enough this topic came up on the WoW US-forums and a number of people, maybe half, said their names were that important to them. Even their level 10 bank alts name was very precious. I'd imagine those people would rather their Realm or WoW die altogether before changing their names. That's pretty amazing to me, but then again, the MMO crowd is an odd lot

That is still counting characters and not accounts though. If we are going to simply count characters, http://wow.realmpop.com/ is a better site to use, as it pulls data directly from the Blizzard API and counts all characters, not just ones who participate in PvE raid content or belong to guilds that do.

Well I think WoWProgress pulls their numbers similarly (I'm just not sure how many times it updates if you don't force it and therefor how accurate it is).

Plus I don't see the value in having many level 90s on a realm. Sure at the start of an expansion (like right now) the numbers of 90s and active players probably correlate. But as the expansion goes on this really isn't true anymore.

You need some value to define 'active'. I personally think PvE (although an additional PvP component would be nice) is the way to go here.

Point taken tho. If you are only interested in how many 90s and not how many 'active' 90s then wow.realmpop.com is the way to go.

Edit:
Furthermore I don't see the issue of account vs. character that harshly. If one guy maintains 5 active characters it mean he's on 5 times as much thus making the server 5 times as populated. Just not at peak times.

Originally Posted by Saffa

Server alliancehordetotal

Agamaggan PvP Normal English CET 14,65517,643 0.831 32,371

That is a medium server according to realmpop - figures taken 3 minutes ago

Yeah but put the slider to level 90s only. Suddenly the number goes to ~1600.

Amazingly enough this topic came up on the WoW US-forums and a number of people, maybe half, said their names were that important to them. Even their level 10 bank alts name was very precious. I'd imagine those people would rather their Realm or WoW die altogether before changing their names. That's pretty amazing to me, but then again, the MMO crowd is an odd lot

I do care about the name, but not as much as realm pop. If I could transfer all my characters to a high pop realm, I couldn't care less about names. In addition, half of the people do not care about character names much, why screw them? Let the willing people transfer. The people who care about names over realm pop shouldn't mind much that the realm pop is even lower after people transfer off, so long as they keep their precioussss names.

Never noticed that population part, gives some interesting figures. For example:
The number of active players on EU realms is 1,374,106
The number of active players on US realms is 1,061,081
The number of active players on Taiwan realms 128,896
The number of active players on Korean realms is 49,895

So, total active raiding population is: 2,613,978 according to wowprogress?

***With population defined as the amount of level 90 characters that meet any of the two conditions:
- The character is from a guild and the guild killed something in Tier 13 content
- The character killed something in Tier 13 content

Might also shed some light on the endless "Why are the best guilds usually from EU?" since EU has a raiding playerbase which is around 23% larger than US.

At this point I can't say that's a bad idea anymore. With account-level achievements and mounts it's easier than ever just to begin again.

Why should players have to pay extra or spend months recreating their characters? It is not unreasonable to ask Blizzard to address these problems, but why would they when the standard advice is throw more money at them?

Originally Posted by Gurbz

Merging realms would create more problems than it fixes, at least short term. There are tons of threads explaining the specifics so I won't go into them. But I would much sooner expect Blizzard to make all character transfers free before I would expect them to consider permanently merging realms.

WOW China has merged several realms in the past year and does not seem to be suffering from any long lasting problems. I am sure that Blizzard could use their experience to ensure that ours would go smoothly.

IIn addition, half of the people do not care about character names much, why screw them? Let the willing people transfer.

Well, the topic was more in response to Ghostcrawler's response to why Blizzard doesn't merge realms and one of his responses was that "people cared about their names" And many of us thought that was silly, but it appears that GC\Blizzard does understand their playerbase and that merging servers could cause more backlash than it fixes.

I still question how many people would really quit if they were forced into a name change. I mean, I like my names, but do I like them more actually playing the game ? Granted I hate the thought of losing my name to a lvl 1 bank alt.

Well, the topic was more in response to Ghostcrawler's response to why Blizzard doesn't merge realms and one of his responses was that "people cared about their names" And many of us thought that was silly, but it appears that GC\Blizzard does understand their playerbase and that merging servers could cause more backlash than it fixes.

I still question how many people would really quit if they were forced into a name change. I mean, I like my names, but do I like them more actually playing the game ? Granted I hate the thought of losing my name to a lvl 1 bank alt.

The naming issue could easily be overcome by keeping the name of the original server as part of it, much like you see in cross realm instances/zones for example Arthassss-Server A that way Arthassss-Server B would be happy that he would not have to add any extra s's to his name.

There's plenty of players that do not have a 90, strange as that may sound.

I believe that 90% of the WoW population (US+EU only) that plays regularly (at least once a week) does have at least one level 90 by now.
(I do not have any numbers to back this up at all though.)

I know plenty of casual WoWers and all they do is quest. They level up more quickly than you think.

But alas there is some truth in that. If there was a sever that had 100,000 active twinks playing constantly it would be increadibly hard to find out given that Blizzard does not share their data (for obvious reasons). You'd have to run oldschool trackers relying on people logging in and recording it. Wowcensus tried that and it never worked.

The naming issue could easily be overcome by keeping the name of the original server as part of it, much like you see in cross realm instances/zones for example Arthassss-Server A that way Arthassss-Server B would be happy that he would not have to add any extra s's to his name.

But how well would that work when trying to whisper someone, or send them mail. what if I joined a guild ? I'd have a foot long name. And if there are two BoB's on the same faction and one bob has the old server name, how many times might the wrong bob get his whispers\mail etc ? Sure we could all get use to it eventually, but am I really keeping my name if I go from bob to Bob-Bleeding Hollow ? I personally don't want my old server, which we would assume would get turned off at some point, to be a part of my name forever.

The naming issue could easily be overcome by keeping the name of the original server as part of it, much like you see in cross realm instances/zones for example Arthassss-Server A that way Arthassss-Server B would be happy that he would not have to add any extra s's to his name.

I don't know how accurate WowProgress is about the server populations, but looking at the bottom of the EU servers list, there are 2 servers with less than 200 on them, is that really accurate or just way out?

EU.Hakkar is showing only 119 players, that feels about the same as the horde side on my server, let alone the whole server...

It's probably not accurate. Wowprogress only tracks raiding toons. My server is medium population, but it's an RP server that likely has a lot less raiders than most, so our population shows a lot lower on Wowprogress than it likely is.

If it's low enough population that raiding guilds have transferred off to servers to keep their roster full, the remaining people probably have less raiding opportunities and exaggerates the population deficit.

It's probably not accurate. Wowprogress only tracks raiding toons. My server is medium population, but it's an RP server that likely has a lot less raiders than most, so our population shows a lot lower on Wowprogress than it likely is.

If it's low enough population that raiding guilds have transferred off to servers to keep their roster full, the remaining people probably have less raiding opportunities and exaggerates the population deficit.

And still many many players don't raid.

Looking around my RL friend list I see around 70% not even raiding once. Some do PvP and hate raiding, some just level toons. My son was a heavy Arena player but these days he just logs in for a casual BG. His study takes priority and that's fine.

Since I play mostly D3 I didn't do any raiding either in MoP neither in CATA. i think the last raid I was in was the final Raid of Wotlk and about half way through that one. I mostly played PvP with my son.

My problem is that you can't play 2 games at once. And since D3 does not need attunements or gearscore it is much simpler to play without the NEED to play.

Also if you are more interested in PvP, it already takes 2 full gear sets when you play a Paladin (healer/dps), so you simply don't have the time to play PVE and assemble gear that much.

Why should players have to pay extra or spend months recreating their characters? It is not unreasonable to ask Blizzard to address these problems, but why would they when the standard advice is throw more money at them?

WOW China has merged several realms in the past year and does not seem to be suffering from any long lasting problems. I am sure that Blizzard could use their experience to ensure that ours would go smoothly.

If you bought a TV, and paid the silly "extended warranty" on the TV, do you go to the manufacturer of the TV and/or the store and say "hey, wait a minute, my tv didn't come with an HDMI cable for some reason" and not accept the answer of very few/none actually come with HDMI cables?

It's the same thing here. The TV is the game, the HDMI cable is the realm. There is no expectation that blizzard fix something that IS BEING OFFERED, you just don't want to pay for it.

WOW China has merged several realms in the past year and does not seem to be suffering from any long lasting problems. I am sure that Blizzard could use their experience to ensure that ours would go smoothly.

I said it would cause problems in the short term. Long term it would help the problem, though it would not solve it by any means, and certainly is not the cure-all that some people make it out to be. It is honestly a heavy handed and inelegant solution to the problem, especially since there will be people who actually LIKE playing on a low population realm that would not want a merger to happen.

I would rather see Blizzard just drop the cost of character transfers. Remove the barrier to people playing where they want, and nobody will have cause to complain any more, as it is their choice alone keeping them where they are at.

All this complaining is simply further proof that Blizzard could send each and every player a real-life wish-granting flying unicorn carrying a solid gold plate of chocolate chip cookies wrapped in hundred dollar bills, and someone would whine that Blizzard sucks for not letting them choose oatmeal raisin.

Originally Posted by DeadmanWalking

If your guild demands you slip into an elephants butt and force yourself out in a regurgation then you can't blame Blizzard for supplying the elephant.

Factions matter. If you're on the 10% side of a 90-10 realm then you'd see much the same thing even if you were waiting in queue to log in.

As well, I think the calculation about how a realm size is determined is somewhat more complicated than just counting toons. I've seen my server go from Medium to High Population and back to medium in the course of a couple of hours.

After the recent dustup about CRZ, I imagine that Blizzard is never ever going to do forced population migrations in any case. Apparently a lot of people like their low population servers just fine. The fact that someone doesn't and wants Blizzard to fix it for free is not really relevant given that.

Last edited by MoanaLisa; 2013-02-20 at 06:00 PM.

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The naming issue could easily be overcome by keeping the name of the original server as part of it, much like you see in cross realm instances/zones for example Arthassss-Server A that way Arthassss-Server B would be happy that he would not have to add any extra s's to his name.

Then they would have to integrate all other systems that rely on unique names to comprehend Alturic" - Stormrage" is different than Alturic" - Stormreaver".

It's honestly not as simple a solution simply because LFG/CRZ adds the realm names after the regular name.

---------- Post added 2013-02-20 at 01:00 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Gurbz

I said it would cause problems in the short term. Long term it would help the problem, though it would not solve it by any means, and certainly is not the cure-all that some people make it out to be. It is honestly a heavy handed and inelegant solution to the problem, especially since there will be people who actually LIKE playing on a low population realm that would not want a merger to happen.

I would rather see Blizzard just drop the cost of character transfers. Remove the barrier to people playing where they want, and nobody will have cause to complain any more, as it is their choice alone keeping them where they are at.

I do think providing a one-time per account coupon code for a free transfer would be a decent (overall) solution to the "problem" that does already have a solution in place to fix. Simply not wanting to pay an additional fee is not cause for saying "it's on Blizzard" to fix it. They did give a way to goto another realm, you just don't want to pay for it.

I do think providing a one-time per account coupon code for a free transfer would be a decent (overall) solution to the "problem" that does already have a solution in place to fix. Simply not wanting to pay an additional fee is not cause for saying "it's on Blizzard" to fix it. They did give a way to goto another realm, you just don't want to pay for it.

I actually agree with you that players who are unhappy have a solution available to them, and are probably better off utilizing the service already offered rather than wait for Blizzard to do something else. But it is not an ideal solution really. What should a player on a very low pop realm do if they have 11 characters on that realm? It is not reasonable to expect such a player to pay $275 to move all of their characters off the dead realm. Nor is it fair to tell that player that they just have to choose one character.

All this complaining is simply further proof that Blizzard could send each and every player a real-life wish-granting flying unicorn carrying a solid gold plate of chocolate chip cookies wrapped in hundred dollar bills, and someone would whine that Blizzard sucks for not letting them choose oatmeal raisin.

Originally Posted by DeadmanWalking

If your guild demands you slip into an elephants butt and force yourself out in a regurgation then you can't blame Blizzard for supplying the elephant.